There are a wide variety of computer network communications techniques such as point-to-point network protocols, client/server middleware, multicasting network protocols, and peer-to-peer middleware. Each of these communications techniques have their advantages and disadvantages, but none is particularly well suited to the simultaneous sharing of information among computers that are widely distributed. For example, collaborative processing applications, such as a network meeting programs, have a need to distribute information in a timely manner to all participants who may be geographically distributed.
The point-to-point network protocols, such as UNIX pipes, TCP/IP, and UDP, allow processes on different computers to communicate via point-to-point connections. The interconnection of all participants using point-to-point connections, while theoretically possible, does not scale well as a number of participants grows. For example, each participating process would need to manage its direct connections to all other participating processes. Programmers, however, find it very difficult to manage single connections, and management of multiple connections is much more complex. In addition, participating processes may be limited to the number of direct connections that they can support. This limits the number of possible participants in the sharing of information.
The client/server middleware systems provide a server that coordinates the communications between the various clients who are sharing the information. The server functions as a central authority for controlling access to shared resources. Examples of client/server middleware systems include remote procedure calls (“RPC”), database servers, and the common object request broker architecture (“CORBA”). Client/server middleware systems are not particularly well suited to sharing of information among many participants. In particular, when a client stores information to be shared at the server, each other client would need to poll the server to determine that new information is being shared. Such polling places a very high overhead on the communications network. Alternatively, each client may register a callback with the server, which the server then invokes when new information is available to be shared. Such a callback technique presents a performance bottleneck because a single server needs to call back to each client whenever new information is to be shared. In addition, the reliability of the entire sharing of information depends upon the reliability of the single server. Thus, a failure at a single computer (i.e., the server) would prevent communications between any of the clients.
The multicasting network protocols allow the sending of broadcast messages to multiple recipients of a network. The current implementations of such multicasting network protocols tend to place an unacceptable overhead on the underlying network. For example, UDP multicasting would swamp the Internet when trying to locate all possible participants. IP multicasting has other problems that include needing special-purpose infrastructure (e.g., routers) to support the sharing of information efficiently.
The peer-to-peer middleware communications systems rely on a multicasting network protocol or a graph of point-to-point network protocols. Such peer-to-peer middleware is provided by the T.120 Internet standard, which is used in such products as Data Connection's D.C.-share and Microsoft's NetMeeting. These peer-to-peer middleware systems rely upon a user to assemble a point-to-point graph of the connections used for sharing the information. Thus, it is neither suitable nor desirable to use peer-to-peer middleware systems when more than a small number of participants is desired. In addition, the underlying architecture of the T. 120 Internet standard is a tree structure, which relies on the root node of the tree for reliability of the entire network. That is, each message must pass through the root node in order to be received by all participants.
It would be desirable to have a reliable communications network that is suitable for the simultaneous sharing of information among a large number of the processes that are widely distributed.